Surviving desert heat, alpine cold, and meager rainfall each year, two-needle pinyon pines (Pinus edulis) are the backbone of many forests in the southwestern United States. Their stout branches offer shade for bighorn sheep and sagebrush lizards, while their yearly crop of nuts has nourished humans for millennia. But 150 years of grazing, fire suppression, and other land-use changes have transformed these forests. In many areas, thickets of young trees are choking out woodlands once dominated by widely spaced pines more than a century old. An old two-leaf pinyon pine on the Grand Canyon North Rim, Arizona. Photo credit: bloodredrapture on Flickr A two-leaf pinyon pine cone with nuts inside Northeast of Valle, Arizona. Photo credit: Curtis Clark on Wikimedia Commons On the Navajo Nation, some ranchers became concerned that the changing forests no longer have enough of the tender grasses relished by their livestock. To help restore the traditional ecology of these dry woodlands, Arizona researchers worked with undergraduate students to remove the dense growths of saplings on land used by Navajo ranchers. This project can be “traced all the way back to meetings within the community of how they can address this issue,” said Navajo researcher Lionel Whitehair, a PhD student in forestry at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff and lead author of a recent study in Trees, Forests and People. Whitehair and his colleagues conducted their experiment on a 10-hectare (25-acre) study plot at Diné College, a tribally-controlled community college in northeastern Arizona. This site, which…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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